Targeted Search Ads Separate From Content Ads

Organizing your Adwords accounts and campaigns to separate pay per click results for targeted search ads and targeted content ads will help you manage your Adwords campaigns for better return on investment. Let's take a detailed look at how...

Google has two basic types of ways that it displays your targeted pay per click advertisements, search ads and content ads. This search ad and content ad concept is also applicable for Yahoo! and MSN.
Targeted Search Ad Results

When the searcher conducts research on the keyword or a keyword phrase they are delivered the page of results in their browser. In the left column are the top ten pages considered most relevant to the key word being searched. A smaller column to the right includes paid advertisements that are related and relevant to the keyword being searched.These are targeted search ads.

Clicks derived from targeted search ad results are likely to be highly effective because of the context in which they are delivered. The searcher is actively interested in finding out information related to the keywords being searched.

Traffic generated from paid clicks on targeted search ad results are likely to:

* be highly engaged with your content or product
* have better clicks through rates
* be more likely to convert into leads or buyers.

Targeted Content Ad Results

Many publishers of online content try to generate income by displaying ads alongside their content. Syndicated content ads by Google (and a host of other networks) run on these pages and these content ads are targeted to match the content of the ad copy with the content of the pages. This match-up thereby delivers targeted content ads that are relevant to for the reader of the web page.

Clicks derived from ads embedded in content are a completely different animal from targeted search ad results which appear on the right hand column of the search engine results page. The person clicking on targeted content ads has a much more casual interest in what you have to offer. They were reading an article or scanning a page and stumbled upon your ad… and clicked it. They may simply be curious rather than genuinely interested.

Traffic generated from paid clicks on targeted content ads are likely to be:

* less engaged with your content or product
* have significantly lower click through rates
* less likely to convert into leads for buyers once they reach your website.

These differences will dramatically affect how you manage your bids, budgets, copy development and a whole lot more. Here are some key points to consider:

Differing click through rates and conversion rates
If you mix your search ads and content ads together in the same campaigns or adgroups you may find it very difficult to track your performance because of the significant differences in click through rates and conversion.

Click through rates for targeted search ads can be up to 100 times the click through rates for targeted content ads. If you got an average click through rate of 1% from your targeted search ads and only 0.01% from your targeted content ads they will have a combined campaign level click through rate of about .5% which doesn’t tell you anything meaningful and gives you nothing you can act upon.

Differing keyword groupings & quality scores
The keyword lists you develop for targeted search ads will generally be putting organized in categories and sub categories so you can match them up closely with your ad copy to get a higher quality score. This leads to a large number of campaign and ad groups which demands greater time to manage.

Quality score is not as important for content targeted results so you may want to have fewer ad groups and target broader keywords which will trigger relevant content. This makes your content targeted ad campaigns much easier to manage.

Differing methods for optimization
Optimizing for targeted search ads involves strategic bidding based upon conversion rates for specific keywords. Optimizing for targeted content ads is more about tracking the overall performance of the group. This is because currently you do not get any feedback on which particular keywords triggered the ad placement for the click through.

Another unique element for optimizing targeted content ads is exclusions of irrelevant words… For example an advertisement for Phlebotomy products targeting the word “blood” might want to eliminate the word “vampire”.

Or, poorly performing websites like myspace.com so as to avoid all the twilight fan sites. These can eat up your daily budget in a heartbeat so be on guard!

Excluding irrelevant words and websites is not an issue with targeted search ads.



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